This page summarizes my twenty-second year of tax resistance. (Links to previously posted Picket Line pages expand on some things I mention. You can follow these links by clicking on the “♦” symbols.)

Picket Line Annual Report

Twenty-two years ago, on 19 March 2003, the U.S. attacked Iraq. This began a foolish, brutal, aggressive war, launched on dishonest pretenses, with disastrous results. For me it was the last straw, and I started what I then called “an experiment” in tax resistance so that I might no longer feel as complicit.♦ My goal was to stop financially supporting the U.S. government.

Tax Resistance

At first I hoped to do this entirely legally by lowering my income below the federal income tax line. I quit my job to start a one-man consulting business in which I could regulate my income, and I took advantage of legal tax deductions and credits, while also attending to frugality. This turned out to be a successful way to legally avoid federal income tax, as well as a rewarding way to make a living, and I continue to operate this way today.

However, I have been liable for self-employment tax in most years (this is different from the income tax but also goes to the federal government). In 2006 I decided to stop paying that tax as well. I have not found a useful way to do this legally, so I simply refuse to send a check. As a result I have accumulated an unpaid tax bill which, along with penalties & interest added by the IRS (minus a bit that they’ve managed to seize from me over the years, and some that is now uncollectible due to the statute of limitations), now adds up to something in the neighborhood of $94,000.

My two-track strategy of legally avoiding income tax while non-legally refusing to pay self-employment tax is somewhat awkward to explain, but works for me.

Many years ago, the IRS levied my bank accounts and seized about $6,200 of the total of about $142,000 that I have refused to pay. I don’t have any fail-safe plan to hide assets, so the IRS could continue to seize money when they find it. However they haven’t taken anything from me for over a decade, or even seem to have tried very hard, though they still send me pleading letters from time to time. This lack of enforcement may mean they’ve run out of easy seizure targets, or it may mean my overdue amount falls under the threshold at which they start trying harder. (Years of budget cuts and other crises have made the agency something of a paper tiger, and as the agency seems to be first in line for DOGE firings and other such trumpery, I suspect this will continue to be the case.)

In 2018, the IRS filed a formal tax lien against me in my local court system. They updated that lien in each of the following two years, stopped for a while, and then reestablished the lien some time last year. The lien has not had any practical effect on my life or my tax resistance. The only effect I have noticed so far is junkmail from shady companies promising they can settle my tax debt for pennies on the dollar (the lien is a public document, so these companies use lien filings to target their sales pitches).♦ The lien didn’t even register on my credit report, which I found surprising.

The total amount I owe is well over the threshold at which the IRS is supposed to notify the State Department that I ought to be forbidden a passport and perhaps ought to have my passport revoked. It took the agency longer than I expected, but they eventually submitted such a notification in 2019.♦ This means that the State Department could revoke my passport at any time, and in any case is not supposed to allow me to renew it when it expires in 2028. So far they have not revoked my passport. Indeed I took a long overseas vacation last year and didn’t experience any passport-related hassles.

Last May, when another year of my tax debt became uncollectible due to the statute of limitations, I wrote a check for that amount to Charity Entrepreneurship, as a charitable donation to celebrate. Charity Entrepreneurship is a group that mentors and gives seed funding to aspiring founders of high-impact nonprofits to help them succeed. I hope to make a similar donation in a couple of months when another year’s taxes seem likely to become uncollectible in the same way.

My 2024 Federal Tax Resistance

After all the dust settled, last year I “owed” and refused to pay $6,309 in federal taxes.

Sustainability

I want to continue to resist taxes for the long term, so it is important (if I want to stick to my below-the-tax-line method) that my expenses remain low enough that my income-tax-free income is sustainable. In 2024 I brought in almost $45,000 in profit from my business. My day-to-day expenses rose, thanks to inflation and such. Rents in my part of California are high, and rent amounts to nearly 60% of my annual taxable expenses. As best as I can estimate, my regular costs for things like rent, utilities, food, and transportation that I must pay for out of below-the-tax-line income came to about $1,950 per month, or $23,400 a year:

Not included in the above pie chart are any business expenses that I can deduct from my taxable income, most healthcare expenses (which I can pay for from my pre-tax Health Savings Account), my self-employment tax assessment (half of which I can deduct), or money I put aside for retirement (which I typically do in tax-deferred accounts). I also didn’t include my vacation spending splurge, which I’d been saving up for and think of as extra-budgetary.

I now rent an apartment at which many of the utilities are bundled into the rent. This makes it difficult to compare expenses over time, as in some past years utilities were a more significant distinct line-item.

My transportation budget is very low because where I live it’s easy to get around on bike and so I don’t own a motor vehicle and rarely need to use one. I’ve also been learning to do my own bike repairs and maintenance at the local “bike kitchen,” which keeps my costs even lower.

My health expenses were low last year, so I didn’t have to dip far into my Health Savings Account. It’s replenished enough to more than cover my deductible in case I run into bad health luck. I use it more as an additional retirement savings vehicle than for health expenses these days.

My yearly living expenses take up pretty much all of my “under the tax line” budget, but I’ve got enough squirreled away in savings now that I don’t feel like I’m cutting things too close for comfort.

However, if I were to budget-in the imposed self-employment tax (which I don’t intend to voluntarily pay, but which could be seized from me), that would come to another $6,300 or so of expenses, half of which also counts against my under-the-tax-line budget. And even if the government never gets its hands on that money, I’ve adopted the practice of making charitable donations to match the amount of my back taxes that become uncollectible due to the statute of limitations. For example, if my oldest tax debt is voided by the statute of limitations next month, I hope to write a check for $5,536 to some charity to celebrate. I can’t do that within my budget: I have to dip into savings, and I may ultimately have to tap my Roth IRA if I want to keep that up year after year.

My 1040: A walk-through

Here’s how I expect my 1040 will work out this year. First, my Total Income:

My total income is all business income, which came from two sources: my consulting work as a technical writer, and sales of my books. I had been expecting slightly more income, but a late check from a client got lost in the holiday mail and so will be applied to this year’s income instead.

Now on to my Adjusted Gross Income:

Last year, I put away $16,299 for retirement and another $5,150 for either current medical spending or for retirement. Together, those savings represent more than 48% of my income.

The self-employment tax deduction works like this: When you work for someone else, your employer pays half of your FICA and the other half comes out of your paycheck. This means the half paid by your employer doesn’t count as your income and so you don’t pay income tax on it. If you’re self-employed, you pay both halves of the tax, so the IRS lets you take half (roughly) of your self-employment tax as an income tax deduction to even things out (even if you’re refusing to pay, like I am).

My Adjusted Gross Income is well below the $23,000 threshold at which I get the maximum rate on the Retirement Savings Contributions Credit. That is the target I try to hit in order to get my federal income tax down to zero.

Now we go from Adjusted Gross Income to Taxable Income:

The Qualified Business Income deduction is 20% of that portion of my income that comes from self-employment, capped at 20% of what my taxable income would be without the deduction. The first Trump administration cut corporate income taxes, and this deduction was designed to give a similar break to non-corporate business entities (like me) who declare business earnings on our personal income tax forms. It doesn’t affect the bottom line of how much I owe but I include it here for completeness.

Anyway, from there, my tax owed:

I plan to file a tax return that shows these accurate amounts, but I will not include a check for the tax due.

Other Goals

I hope other people will resist their taxes too, and I have tried to make The Picket Line a good resource for people who are resisting or considering it. But I’ve been much less active than usual on this front. A while back I stepped back from the blog and stopped creating new content for it. I’d gotten tired of being a tax resistance scholar and activist, and felt like decentering tax resistance in my life, to make it more incidental, and to occupy myself more with other pastimes.

Much of my “activism” of late is less focused on politics and protest and rebellion, particularly on the national/global scale, and much more focused on embarrassingly wholesome direct action at the local scale. I’ve been volunteering regularly for the local food bank at one of our farmers’ markets, bringing thousands of pounds of fresh donated produce to a food pantry to give to hungry families. And I’ve been helping to operate a mobile shower trailer program that serves homeless people in our community several times a week. (All of this is easier for me because of the reduced and more-flexible work hours that are part of my tax resistance, and so can be seen as another form of tax redirection.♦)

I’ve also been continuing my work on a sequence of essays examining the virtues and how to improve in their practice.

Prospects for the coming year

But maybe I picked a bad time to go into semi-retirement as a tax resistance promoter. The National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee has noted a surge of interest in war tax resistance thanks to the war in Gaza. Trump Ⅱ will probably wake up some slumbering anti-establishment sorts too.

I feel conflicted about the Trump administration. On the one hand, they’re vicious, cruel, stupid, dishonest, and irresponsible. On the other hand, they’re swinging a wrecking ball erratically but enthusiastically at most of the institutions of power in Washington and bringing the federal government into thorough disrepute domestically and internationally. I would rather have honorable people smashing the state, but I’ll take what I can get.

The DOGE crew has already begun to hobble the IRS. Knowing what I know about the IRS and its teetering information technology infrastructure, I think as Elon tries his twittery move-fast-and-break-things stunts there, the whole house of cards may collapse. As a result, tax resisters like myself may be safer now than ever just because the tax enforcement bodies are in such disarray. On the other hand, while tax enforcement has at least since the Nixon administration been largely non-partisan, Trump clearly intends to use it to go after his enemies (among which I hope to qualify).

There’s also talk of more methodical destruction. Not long ago, Trump blathered some sort of half-baked fantasy about replacing the Internal Revenue Service entirely with an “External Revenue Service” that would try to fund the government off tariffs somehow. He also nominated Billy Long to be IRS Commissioner. Long, while a member of the House of Representatives, co-sponsored a bill that would have replaced the federal income and payroll taxes with a national sales tax.♦ This is an administration that’s willing to go to the mat for bad ideas, so things like these could conceivably come to pass.

At this point, Congress has not given much of a reliable signal about what it will do with the tax law. The tax legislation priorities thusfar announced by the Trump administration are not particularly radical. But at this point, it’s not even entirely clear whether Congress still holds the authority to make laws that have a non-ceremonial effect; they seem largely untroubled by Trump just deciding for himself what the law ought to be. We are in an era of (among other things) considerable uncertainty regarding the future (or even the present) of the tax code. But assuming tax law (or its equivalent in trumpery) remains more or less the same, and assuming no major unexpected expenses or windfalls, I’m well-positioned to live comfortably and well under the income tax line again in the coming year, though I will again “owe” (and refuse to pay) self-employment tax.

I’ve prepared for the possibility that the IRS may try to seize money from me for unpaid back taxes, so in case this happens, it won’t be a disaster. And, if they fail again, I’m also prepared to dip into my savings to give to charity in celebration.

So on to year twenty-three of my “experiment.”